There are two ways to see a film like Fritz Lang's silent dystopian fantasy "Metropolis," a fabulous restored print of which is opening today at the Kennedy Center's AFI Theater.
You can approach it as if it's a cathedral and draw near on bended knee, noting the brilliance of the design, the eerie prescience of the set decoration, the exquisite modulations in the black-and-white cinematography. You can note how much more coherent is this longest restoration of the film, how it recaptures and clarifies issues of motive missing in other versions. In other words, you can worship it.
The robot awaits her master's command in Fritz Lang's "Metropolis."
(File Photo)
|
|
Then there's my approach. That is, you sit back and have some fun. You enjoy it, and there's much to enjoy.
First off, don't be shy about laughing. It takes a disciplined imagination to see the stylizations of the '20s as fresh and new, as they must have seemed to audiences in 1927. If you don't have a disciplined imagination (few do these days), then it's okay to roar when the Man-Machine Vamp (Brigitte Helm) does the hootchy-kootchy and the young swells of the Club of the Sons, Metropolis's most gilded social institution, go all gaga. It's probably the seven inches of mascara caking her eyes that made them do it.
And when Gustav Froehlich, as the hero Freder Fredersen (that's a pretty funny name itself), keeps clenching his pasty little fist to his fishy little mouth in an attempt to communicate anguish – this is a very sensitive kid, folks – it's all right to laugh at that, too.
And pay no attention to that cornball moral: "The heart must mediate between the head and the hands." I agree: It's pretty simple.
Because the great thing is that despite the over-the-top acting, the makeup that doesn't know when to stop, the preciousness of so many of the compositions (Lang was nothing if not inventive), this is a great old movie-movie. Don't let any preoccupation with "art" keep you from luxuriating in its presence.
"Metropolis" postulates a golden city of accomplishment and beauty up top; but beneath is the workers' city, where the unwashed labor to provide power to the fair lads and lasses on high. But when Freder, the beloved son of Master of Metropolis John Fredersen (an austere Alfred Abel, in the film's only transcendent performance), wanders downstairs to find the beauty he's witnessed (Helm), he's shocked at the squalor and the hopelessness and the brutal working conditions he discovers, and sets about to right things. But everything he does leads to complications, and soon the very foundations of Metropolis are threatened by workers' revolt.
Oh, and I left out the part about the mad scientist, but that's okay, because that part has been left out since Paramount and Ufa, the American and German distributors, "improved" the film by cutting it in half. (It originally was 13,701 feet, or about 2 1/2 hours, long; the commercial versions were less than half that. This one is 10,928 feet long – a little over two hours – and probably close to what audiences saw at its premiere in 1927.)
In any case: "Metropolis" is an event.
METROPOLIS (NR, 227 minutes) – At the American Film Institute's National Film Theater through Aug. 8. For more information call 202-833-AFIT or visit www.afi.com/exhibition/nft.asp
